In September 2015, officials from the agriculture agency of Peru’s Ucayali department arrived in the district of Masisea with one goal: to create a rural land registry in a forested…
This article is a journalistic collaboration between Mongabay’s Latin America (Latam) team and Colombian digital news website Rutas del Conflicto. Ana Villa has traveled dozens of times on the highways…
About 14% of the Brazilian Amazon, an area the size of Spain and Portugal combined, falls under the category of non-designated public forests, or NDPFs. These are state or federally…
Since the beginning of time, Indigenous peoples have used signals from nature to guide their way of life. Their calendar is structured by the rhythm of plant growth or rains,…
While watching underwater video of a male turtleheaded sea snake attempting to court a female, Jenna Crowe-Riddell noticed something shocking but not uncommon: the male got lost. After pursuing the…
This report is a partnership between Mongabay Latam, Rutas del Conflicto and La Liga Contra el Silencio. In Colombia’s Meta department, a stretch of several miles of reddish, arable land…
To hear an audio version of this article, listen here: Technology isn’t always a practical solution for Indigenous communities fighting for their land rights. Some technology requires internet access, which…
June 8, 2021 was a tense day for environmental organizations and citizens’ groups working to protect the Amazon and Indigenous Brazilians. Groups like Greenpeace and APIB (Brazilian Indigenous People’s Association)…
With extreme heat, African wild dogs are dying at a higher rate, according to scientists. New research, published in Ecology and Evolution in June, found that humans are responsible for…
"My husband would go to the neighbor's barn two or three times a week to get pig manure. He'd throw it in the biodigester and we were able to cook…
Drifting down the Dubo River through Sapo National Park in Liberia, Shadrach Kerwillain, a project manager for Fauna & Flora International (FFI), takes a sample of fresh river water. It’s…
“The body is here. We’re going to die!” That’s what Watatakalu Yawalapiti heard over the phone from her relatives after the death of an uncle from COVID-19 in June 2020.…
In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), critically endangered Grauer’s gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri) share their forest home with rural communities – which could help save their shrinking populations and…
Scientists describing a new species of ant, Strumigenys ayersthey, have broken with conventional naming traditions and used the pronoun “they” instead of the traditional male or female form to promote…
The pace of deforestation has surged in the region around Brazil’s BR-319 highway since the federal government announced its interest in restarting road works, a new study has found. The…
Conservationists in Brazil have raised alarms about the impact of a wind farm being built in a region that’s the last stronghold of the endangered Lear’s macaw. French renewable energy…
In Brazil, as in many other biodiverse countries around the world, the commercial trade of some species of wildlife is allowed — as long as the animal was bred in…
The Javan pied starling (Gracupica jalla) is a captive in its own home. Thousands of these endemic songbirds once congregated in the safety of tall trees to roost after spending…
EL PALMAR, Bolivia — It was worth the journey. After sweating across the scrubby Bolivian mountainsides, stepping into the forest was like entering a different world. Twisted pino de monte…
The Caatinga is the most densely populated semiarid region in the world and the only exclusively Brazilian biome. The region needs assistance to prevent it from becoming an immense desert.…
Deforestation driven by illegal mining around Peru’s Pariamanu River has accelerated in the past six months, with forests one and a half times the size of London’s Hyde Park lost…
On March 25, water from a pond owned by Canadian miner Equinox Gold spilled over its embankments in the Brazilian state of Maranhão amid heavy rain. The water flowed into…
Fires had a devastating effect in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, in Colombia’s Caribbean region, between 2012 and 2013. In 2013 alone, the region lost an estimated that 22,000…
In 2003, biologist Vreni Häussermann and a group of researchers started surveying underwater life at a site in the Comau Fjord, in Chilean Patagonia. The team found that sea cucumbers,…
Indigenous people in the Brazilian Amazon are dying at twice the officially recorded rate from COVID-19, according to an independent study that also found a higher rate of infections than…
Much of the land that’s been cleared for pasture in the Brazilian Cerrado could potentially be restored to its previous savanna state while still leaving enough space for the country’s…
The COVID-19 pandemic brought zoonotic diseases into the global spotlight in a way nothing has done for a century, even though zoonoses — diseases passed between humans and animals —…
In Brazil’s beef industry, meatpackers or slaughterhouses that are monitored and audited to comply with zero-deforestation purchasing criteria compete against facilities that flout the rules. Ranches with the space and…
In the forests of El Tuparro National Natural Park, a protected area in the far east of Colombia’s Orinoco region, a jaguar roams freely, the king of a territory it…
That Indigenous peoples and traditional populations are the most important forest guardians in Latin America and the Caribbean is an established fact. A report released in March by the United…